


And these the last

by miabicicletta



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2540111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miabicicletta/pseuds/miabicicletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sherlock,” asks Molly, outside of time. “Do you love me?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	And these the last

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ["Tonight I write the saddest lines"](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview27) by Pablo Neruda. 
> 
> All my love and thanks as ever to the dear **[Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington)** for her keen eyes and thoughtful words.

* * *

 

Police lights flash in the night. Sirens and shouts splinter the darkness. Molly looks up at him. Her face is scraped and bruised and he is murderous at the sight.

“Was it true?” She swallows. “What he said in there?” Blue light throws strange shapes across her face. In the warped and moving shadows, she seems very old, and she seems very young. He imagines a Molly fifty years from now. He pictures her two decades before.

“Sherlock,” asks Molly, outside of time. “Do you love me?”

Her eyes hold his, the way his arms had come around her when bullets sang in the air above their heads. He can feel the hammer of her heartbeat, the slide of skin on skin. Her hair smelled of smoke and sweat and tea tree oil. Her mouth tasted of blood.

 _Yes_.

“No,” he tells her.

“Alright.” She shrugs off her blanket as she stands, letting it fall to the ground. She does not need a blanket. She is not in shock.

Six weeks later, Molly Hooper is gone. Her office has been taken over by an overly eager laboratory supervisor who writes bad fiction during work hours. The remaining specialists no longer seem acceptable substitutes. In truth, he barely recognizes any of them, and what few he once did have moved on over the years. ( _That’s what people do_ , a most unwelcome voice reminds him). He’s made arrangements at UCL before the cab can ferry him away from the kerb. He texts Mike Stamford—he no longer requires lab privileges at Barts. A reflection in the window catches his eye; a teenage girl in a pale jumper turns over her shoulder, beaming for someone unseen.

He looks away. He does not turn back.

 

* * *

 

It’s a year and half before John and Mary go to Boston. Lestrade too. Sherlock does not ask why. He does not need to. He deletes her number from his phone and he does not understand why an action that is so meaningless, so small, feels so final.

 

* * *

 

Three years later he works a case involving Irene Adler. She is unchanged, unrelenting. He gives in to boredom and is not rewarded for his trouble.

“Who was it?” she asks, smoking.

“Who was what?”

The lift of one perfectly sculpted brow. “The person you clearly prefer was here in my place?”

He does not look up from his phone, rebuilding the walls he foolishly allowed to come down, however briefly. “No one.”

“Right.”

She stares out an open window, smoking her cigarette. Constructing her own barriers, maybe. They are alike that way. “And you?” He does not look up.

“Lillian.” She takes a long drag, watches the smoke spiral in the morning light. “She left.”

“Why?” he asks before he can stop the words in his throat.

Irene Adler looks him over, a look of grim irony forcing itself across her artfully composed face. “Because I wanted her to stay, and people like you and I do not have the luxury of keeping the things that we want.”

 

* * *

 

Years tick by.

Lizzy Watson grows bigger and more interesting. Goes to uni. She does four years with Doctors Without Borders, falls in love, falls out of love, and returns to London a little older and a great deal wiser about what can and cannot be saved. She visits often, occasionally nicks a cigarette from his stash, sitting at the window and watching the world, trying to decide what to make of it. He wishes he had advice to pass her way, but he does not, and does not pretend otherwise. He knows the danger of a well-told lie, even pretty ones, even the ones uttered as protection. The advantages of caring.

He’s halfway down the hall to Deputy Commissioner Lestrade’s office one day when a familiar voice and sunny laugh slice like a blade into a small and underused corner of his heart. For an infinite moment he forgets things like words and deeds and breathing.

Molly’s son is politely dull and speaks with an American accent. He is bored by London, as he is with England in general. He has little interest in the university programs Molly hopes to visit while abroad, his heart set on sunnier climes. Though intelligent enough, maybe, he has little of his mother’s great mind, and less still of her greater heart. Behind a door, he listens to them chatter with Lestrade. He does not speak, and they leave without seeing his face, without knowing he was there at all. Disguises, he remembers Irene Adler say, are always the truest self portrait.

For a long time after, Molly’s laugh echoes in his mind palace, ever out of sight.

 

* * *

 

London becomes too much. He asks Janine about life in the countryside. She’s long since moved to glam and glitzy Tel Aviv with her second husband when the estate near her long-ago revenge property becomes available. “You’ll love it, Sherl,” she tells him. “I know you will.”

He leaves Baker Street to its ghosts. It does not leave him.

 

* * *

 

In Sussex there are still cases. Cases and bees and Lizzy. Lizzy, who has a daughter of her own, now.

“It’s too quiet here,” she tells him, scowling at half-finished experiments, untidy plates, piles of papers. His habits paint a much different picture now than they did when he was young.

Lizzy’s daughter has dark hair and blue eyes and is terribly, hilariously clumsy. She is tiny and bright and it makes him genuinely, painfully happy to see Violet laugh.

“I like it quiet,” he tells her.

Lizzy looks at him, so much like the parents she has often clashed with throughout her life. “No, you don’t.”

 

* * *

 

He never expected to outlive his brother.

 

* * *

 

He never understood John’s anger with him, those many years before, until the day he stood at his best friend's grave and wished he was the kind of man who could ask for miracles.

 

* * *

 

The bees are gone. The house is appropriately messy, as he would have it. A final research paper rests on his desk, drawn up after months of study. The note ( _That’s what people do, isn’t it, leave a note?_ ) for Lizzy lays on the table. The mixture is lethal, masked by the taste of whiskey and honey, and it will take what he is unwilling to let the cancer have. His mind is still as sharp as it has ever been, even as his transport fails. In truth, his mind is all he has left. He will not abide it vanishing, slowly, like a fire going out.

He takes a sip.

A door in his mind opens.

The familiarity is breathtaking. A young woman with large brown eyes stands by his side. Petri dishes collect around them, surrounded by volumes of pristine glassware that sparkle like jewels. Her voice is sweet and nervous, and when she speaks it is with a gentle, lilting quietness. Her answers are always correct, if not confidently so.

He turns to ask her for a slide; she has already placed it by his hand. Her hair curls over one shoulder, long and intricately braided. It is lovely; it suits her. He says as much, and the look she gives him is like shock and joy and hope at once.

And in memory that never was, Molly Hooper smiles. Sherlock Holmes smiles back.

Somewhere, a laboratory door clicks shut.

 

* * *

 

_I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her._  
 _Love is so short, forgetting is so long._

_Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms_  
 _my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her._

_Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer_  
 _and these the last verses that I write for her._  
\- Pablo Neruda

**Author's Note:**

> Pretty much the fastest Sherlock story I've ever written. After reading the semi-infamous Elle UK interview with BC, my heart went _Ouch!_ And then, because I'm a rather masochistic person, I thought "Well, let's write the most heartbreaking story possible where everyone is alive but there's no happy ending." And now, at least for me, maybe that interview doesn't seem to sting quite so much. Yay? *weeps*
> 
> I'm on tumblr if you want to read more (occasionally heartbreaking) stuff I write: [miabicicletta.tumblr.com](http://miabicicletta.tumblr.com).


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